Tag Archives: priorities

In spite of all the advice, the strategic discussions and the conference talks, we Internet marketers are still algorithmic thinkers. That’s obvious when you think of SEO.

Even when we talk about content, we’re algorithmic thinkers. Ask yourself: How many times has a client asked you, “How much content do we need?” How often do you still hear “How unique does this page need to be?”

That’s 100% algorithmic thinking: Produce a certain amount of content, move up a certain number of spaces.

But you and I know it’s complete bullshit.

I’m not suggesting you ignore the algorithm. You should definitely chase it. Understanding a little bit about what goes on in Google’s pointy little head helps. But it’s not enough.

A tale of SEO woe that makes you go “whoa”

I have this friend.

He ranked #10 for “flibbergibbet.” He wanted to rank #1.

He compared his site to the #1 site and realized the #1 site had five hundred blog posts.

“That site has five hundred blog posts,” he said, “I must have more.”

So he hired a few writers and cranked out five thousand blogs posts that melted Microsoft Word’s grammar check. He didn’t move up in the rankings. I’m shocked.

“That guy’s spamming,” he decided, “I’ll just report him to Google and hope for the best.”

What happened? Why didn’t adding five thousand blog posts work?

It’s pretty obvious: My, uh, friend added nothing but crap content to a site that was already outranked. Bulk is no longer a ranking tactic. Google’s very aware of that tactic. Lots of smart engineers have put time into updates like Panda to compensate.

He started like this:

And ended up like this:

Alright, yeah, I was Mr. Flood The Site With Content, way back in 2003. Don’t judge me, whippersnappers.

Reality’s never that obvious. You’re scratching and clawing to move up two spots, you’ve got an overtasked IT team pushing back on changes, and you’ve got a boss who needs to know the implications of every recommendation.

Why fix duplication if rel=canonical can address it? Fixing duplication will take more time and cost more money. It’s easier to paste in one line of code. You and I know it’s better to fix the duplication. But it’s a hard sell.

Why deal with 302 versus 404 response codes and home page redirection? The basic user experience remains the same. Again, we just know that a server should return one home page without any redirects and that it should send a ‘not found’ 404 response if a page is missing. If it’s going to take 3 developer hours to reconfigure the server, though, how do we justify it? There’s no flashing sign reading “Your site has a problem!”

Why change this thing and not that thing?

At the same time, our boss/client sees that the site above theirs has five hundred blog posts and thousands of links from sites selling correspondence MBAs. So they want five thousand blog posts and cheap links as quickly as possible.

Cue crazy music.

SEO lacks clarity

SEO is, in some ways, for the insane. It’s an absurd collection of technical tweaks, content thinking, link building and other little tactics that may or may not work. A novice gets exposed to one piece of crappy information after another, with an occasional bit of useful stuff mixed in. They create sites that repel search engines and piss off users. They get more awful advice. The cycle repeats. Every time it does, best practices get more muddled.

SEO lacks clarity. We can’t easily weigh the value of one change or tactic over another. But we can look at our changes and tactics in context. When we examine the potential of several changes or tactics before we flip the switch, we get a closer balance between algorithm-thinking and actual strategy.

Distance from perfect brings clarity to tactics and strategy

At some point you have to turn that knowledge into practice. You have to take action based on recommendations, your knowledge of SEO, and business considerations.

“All other things being equal, will this change, tactic, or strategy move my site closer to perfect than my competitors?”

Breaking it down:

“Change, tactic, or strategy”

A change takes an existing component or policy and makes it something else. Replatforming is a massive change. Adding a new page is a smaller one. Adding ALT attributes to your images is another example. Changing the way your shopping cart works is yet another.

A tactic is a specific, executable practice. In SEO, that might be fixing broken links, optimizing ALT attributes, optimizing title tags or producing a specific piece of content.

A strategy is a broader decision that’ll cause change or drive tactics. A long-term content policy is the easiest example. Shifting away from asynchronous content and moving to server-generated content is another example.

“Perfect”

No one knows exactly what Google considers “perfect,” and “perfect” can’t really exist, but you can bet a perfect web page/site would have all of the following:

These 8 categories (and any of the other bazillion that probably exist) give you a way to break down “perfect” and help you focus on what’s really going to move you forward. These different areas may involve different facets of your organization.

Your IT team can work on load time and creating an error-free front- and back-end. Link building requires the time and effort of content and outreach teams.

Tactics for relevant, visible content and current best practices in UX are going to be more involved, requiring research and real study of your audience.

What you need and what resources you have are going to impact which tactics are most realistic for you.

But there’s a basic rule: If a website would make Googlebot swoon and present zero obstacles to users, it’s close to perfect.

“All other things being equal”

Assume every competing website is optimized exactly as well as yours.

Now ask: Will this [tactic, change or strategy] move you closer to perfect?

That’s the “all other things being equal” rule. And it’s an incredibly powerful rubric for evaluating potential changes before you act. Pretend you’re in a tie with your competitors. Will this one thing be the tiebreaker? Will it put you ahead? Or will it cause you to fall behind?

“Closer to perfect than my competitors”

Perfect is great, but unattainable. What you really need is to be just a little perfect-er.

Chasing perfect can be dangerous. Perfect is the enemy of the good (I love that quote. Hated Voltaire. But I love that quote). If you wait for the opportunity/resources to reach perfection, you’ll never do anything. And the only way to reduce distance from perfect is to execute.

Instead of aiming for pure perfection, aim for more perfect than your competitors. Beat them feature-by-feature, tactic-by-tactic. Implement strategy that supports long-term superiority.

Don’t slack off. But set priorities and measure your effort. If fixing server response codes will take one hour and fixing duplication will take ten, fix the response codes first. Both move you closer to perfect. Fixing response codes may not move the needle as much, but it’s a lot easier to do. Then move on to fixing duplicates.

Do the 60% that gets you a 90% improvement. Then move on to the next thing and do it again. When you’re done, get to work on that last 40%. Repeat as necessary.

Take advantage of quick wins. That gives you more time to focus on your bigger solutions.

Sites that are “fine” are pretty far from perfect

Google has lots of tweaks, tools and workarounds to help us mitigate sub-optimal sites:

Rel=canonical lets us guide Google past duplicate content rather than fix it

We can use rel=next and prev to guide search bots through outrageously long pagination tunnels

And we can use rel=nofollow to hide spammy links and banners

Easy, right? All of these solutions may reduce distance from perfect (the search engines don’t guarantee it). But they don’t reduce it as much as fixing the problems.

The next time you set up rel=canonical, ask yourself:

“All other things being equal, will using rel=canonical to make up for duplication move my site closer to perfect than my competitors?”

Answer: Not if they’re using rel=canonical, too. You’re both using imperfect solutions that force search engines to crawl every page of your site, duplicates included. If you want to pass them on your way to perfect, you need to fix the duplicate content.

When you use Angular.js to deliver regular content pages, ask yourself:

“All other things being equal, will using HTML snapshots instead of actual, visible content move my site closer to perfect than my competitors?”

Answer: No. Just no. Not in your wildest, code-addled dreams. If I’m Google, which site will I prefer? The one that renders for me the same way it renders for users? Or the one that has to deliver two separate versions of every page?

When you spill banner ads all over your site, ask yourself…

You get the idea. Nofollow is better than follow, but banner pollution is still pretty dang far from perfect.

Mitigating SEO issues with search engine-specific tools is “fine.” But it’s far, far from perfect. If search engines are forced to choose, they’ll favor the site that just works.

Not just SEO

By the way, distance from perfect absolutely applies to other channels.

I’m focusing on SEO, but think of other Internet marketing disciplines. I hear stuff like “How fast should my site be?” (Faster than it is right now.) Or “I’ve heard you shouldn’t have any content below the fold.” (Maybe in 2001.) Or “I need background video on my home page!” (Why? Do you have a reason?) Or, my favorite: “What’s a good bounce rate?” (Zero is pretty awesome.)

And Internet marketing venues are working to measure distance from perfect. Pay-per-click marketing has the quality score: A codified financial reward applied for seeking distance from perfect in as many elements as possible of your advertising program.

Social media venues are aggressively building their own forms of graphing, scoring and ranking systems designed to separate the good from the bad.

Really, all marketing includes some measure of distance from perfect. But no channel is more influenced by it than SEO. Instead of arguing one rule at a time, ask yourself and your boss or client: Will this move us closer to perfect?

Hell, you might even please a customer or two.

One last note for all of the SEOs in the crowd. Before you start pointing out edge cases, consider this: We spend our days combing Google for embarrassing rankings issues. Every now and then, we find one, point, and start yelling “SEE! SEE!!!! THE GOOGLES MADE MISTAKES!!!!” Google’s got lots of issues. Screwing up the rankings isn’t one of them.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

If you think creating content for boring industries is tough, try creating content for an expensive product that’ll be sold in a so-called boring industry. Such was the problem faced by Mike Jackson, head of sales for a large Denver-based company that was debuting a line of new high-end products for the fishing industry in 2009.

After years of pestering the executives of his traditional, non-flashy company to create a line of products that could be sold to anglers looking to buy premium items, he finally had his wish: a product so expensive only a small percentage of anglers could afford them.

What looked like being boxed into a corner was actually part of the plan.

When asked how he could ever put his neck on the line for a product he’d find tough to sell and even tougher to market, he revealed his brilliant plan.

“I don’t need to sell one million of [these products] a year,” he said. “All I need to do is sell a few hundred thousand, which won’t be hard. And as far as marketing, that’s easy: I’m ignoring the folks who’ll buy the items. I’m targeting professional anglers, the folks the buyers are influenced by. If the pros, the influencers, talk about and use the products, people will buy them.”

Such was my first introduction to how it’s often wise to ignore who’ll buy the product in favor of marketing to those who’ll help you market and sell the product.

These influencers are a sweet spot in product marketing and they are largely ignored by many brands

Looking at content for boring industries all wrong

A few months back, I received a message in Google Plus that really piqued my interest: “What’s the best way to create content for my boring business? Just kidding. No one will read it, nor share information from a painter anyway.”

I went from being dismayed to disheartened. Dismayed because the business owner hadn’t yet found a way to connect with his prospects through meaningful content. Disheartened because he seemed to have given up trying.

You can successfully create content for boring industries. Doing so requires nothing out of the ordinary from what you’d normally do to create content for any industry. That’s the good news.

Successfully creating content for boring industries—or any industry, for that matter—comes down to who’ll share it and who’ll link to it, not who’ll read it, a point nicely summed up in this tweet:

I just don’t understand the mindset of ‘build content –> build links to it’. Identify link opps FIRST, then create content to service them.— Jon Cooper (@PointBlankSEO) April 7, 2015

So when businesses struggle with creating content for their respective industries, the culprits are typically easy to find:

They lack clarity on who they are creating content for (e.g., content strategy, personas)

There are no specific goals (e.g., traffic, links, conversions, etc.) assigned regarding the content, so measuring its effectiveness is impossible

They’re stuck in neutral thinking viral content is the only option, while ignoring the value of content amplification (e.g., PR/outreach)

Alone, these three elements are bad; taken together, though, they spell doom for your brand.

If you lack clarity on who you’re creating content for, the best you can hope for is that sometimes you’ll create and share information members of your audience find useful, but you likely won’t be able to reach or engage them with the needed frequency to make content marketing successful.

Goals, or lack thereof, are the real bugaboo of content creation. The problem is even worse for boring industries, where the pressure is on to deliver a content vehicle that meets the threshold of interest to simply gain attention, much less, earn engagement.

For all the hype about viral content, it’s dismaying that so few marketers aren’t being honest on the topic: it’s typically hard to create, impossible to predict and typically has very, very little connection to conversions for most businesses.

What I’ve found is that businesses, regardless of category, struggle to create worthwhile content, leading me to believe there is no boring industry content, only content that’s boring.

“Whenever we label content as ‘boring,’ we’re really admitting we have no idea how to approach marketing something,” says Builtvisible’s Richard Baxter.

Now that we know what the impediments are to producing content for any industry, including boring industries, it’s time to tackle the solution.

Develop a link earning mindset

There are lots of article on the web regarding how to create content for boring industries, some of which have appeared on this very blog.

But, to my mind, the one issue they all suffer from is they all focus on what content should be created, not (a) what content is worthy of promotion, (b) how to identify those who could help with promotion, and (c) how to earn links from boring industry content. (Remember, much of the content that’s read is never shared; much of what’s shared is never read in its entirety; and some of the most linked-to content is neither heavily shared nor heavily read.)

This is why content creators in boring industries should scrap their notions of having the most-read and most-shared content, shifting their focus to creating content that can earn links in addition to generating traffic and social signals to the site.

After all, links and conversions are the main priorities for most businesses sharing content online, including so-called local businesses.

If you’re ready to create link-earning, traffic-generating content for your boring-industry business follow the tips from the fictitious example of RZ’s Auto Repair, a Dallas, Texas, automobile shop.

With the Dallas-Forth Worth market being large and competitive, RZ’s has narrowed their speciality to storm repair, mainly hail damage, which is huge in the area. Even with the narrowed focus, however, they still have stiff competition from the major players in the vertical, including MAACO.

What the brand does have in its favor, however, is a solid website and a strong freelance copywriter to help produce content.

Remember, those three problems we mentioned above—lack of goals, lack of clarity and lack of focus on amplification—we’ll now put them to good use to drive our main objectives of traffic, links and conversions.

Setting the right goals

For RZ, this is easy: He needs sales, business (e.g., qualified leads and conversions), but he knows he must be patient since using paid media is not in the cards.

Therefore, he sits down with his partner, and they come up with what seems like the top five workable, important goals:

Increased traffic on the website – He’s noticed that when traffic increases, so does his business.

More phone calls – If they get a customer on the phone, the chances of closing the sale are around 75%.

One blog per week on the site – The more often he blogs, the more web traffic, visits and phone calls increase.

Links from some of the businesses in the area – He’s no dummy. He knows the importance of links, which are that much better when they come from a large company that could send him business.

Develop relationships with small and midsize non-competing businesses in the area for cross promotions, events and the like.

Know the audience

Too many businesses create cute blogs that might generate traffic but do nothing for sales. RZ isn’t falling for this trap. He’s all about identifying the audience who’s likely to do business with him.

Luckily, his secretary is a meticulous record keeper, allowing him to build a reasonable profile of his target persona based on past clients.

21-35 years old

Drives a truck that’s less than fours years old

Has an income of $45,000-$59,000

Employed by a corporation with greater than 500 employees

Active on social media, especially Facebook and Twitter

Consumes most of their information online

Typically referred by a friend or a co-worker

This information will prove invaluable as he goes about creating content. Most important, these nuggets create a clearer picture of how he should go about looking for people and/or businesses to amplify his content.

PR and outreach: Your amplification engines

Armed with his goals and the knowledge of his audience, RZ can now focus on outreach for amplification, thinking along the lines of…

Who/what influences his core audience?

What could he offer them by way of content to earn their help?

What content would they find valuable enough to share and link to?

What challenges do they face that he could help them with?

How could his brand set itself apart from any other business looking for help from these potential outreach partners?

Putting it all together

Being the savvy businessperson he is, RZ pulls his small staff together and they put their thinking caps on.

Late spring through early fall is prime hail storm season in Dallas. The season accounts for 80 percent of his yearly business. (The other 20% is fender benders.) Also, they realize, many of the storms happen in the late afternoon/early evening, when people are on their way home from work and are stuck in traffic, or when they duck into the grocery store or hit the gym after work.

What’s more, says one of the staffers, often a huge group of clients will come at once, owing to having been parked in the same lot when a storm hits.

That’s when RZ bolts out of his chair with the idea that could put his business on the map: Let’s create content for businesses getting a high volume of after-work traffic—sit-down restaurants, gyms, grocery stores, etc.

The businesses would be offering something of value to their customers, who’ll learn about precautions to take in the event of a hail storm, and RZ would have willing amplifiers for his content.

Content is only as boring as your outlook

First—and this is a fatal mistake too many content creators make—RZ visits the handful of local businesses he’d like to partner with. The key here, however, is he smartly makes them aware that he’s done his homework and is eager to help their patrons while making them aware of his service.

This is an integral part of outreach: there must be a clear benefit to the would-be benefactor.

After RZ learns that several of the businesses are amenable to sharing his business’s helpful information, he takes the next step and asks what form the content should take. For now, all he can get them to promote is a glossy one-sheeter, “How To Protect Your Vehicle Against Extensive Hail Damage,” that the biggest gym in the area will promote via a small display at the check-in in return for a 10% coupon for customers.

Three of the five others he talked to also agreed to promote the one-sheeter, though each said they’d be willing to promote other content investments provided they added value for their customers.

The untold truth about creating content for boring industries

When business owners reach out to me about putting together a content strategy for their boring brand, I make two things clear from the start:

There are no boring brands. Those two words are a cop out. No matter what industry you serve, there are hoards of people who use the products or services who are quite smitten.

What they see as boring, I see as an opportunity.

In almost every case, they want to discuss some of another big content piece that’s sure to draw eyes, engagement, and that maybe even leads to a few links. Sure, I say, if you have tons of money to spend.

This plan is not very hard at all to pull off, provided you have your ear to the street in the local market; have done your keyword research, identifying several long-tail keywords you have the ability to rank for; and you’re willing to continue with outreach.

What it does is allow the brand to create content with enough frequency to attain significance with the search engines, while also developing the habit of sharing, promoting and amplifying content as well. For example, all of the posts would be shared on Twitter, Google Plus, and Facebook. (Don’t sleep on paid promotion via Facebook.)

Also, for the link-worthy asset, there would be outreach in advance of its creation, then amplification, and continued promotion from the company and those who’ve agreed to support the content.

Create a winning trifecta: Outreach, promotion and amplification

To RZ’s credit, he didn’t dawdle, getting right to work creating worthwhile content via the 1-2-1 method:

1: “The Worst Places in Dallas to be When a Hail Storm Hits”2: “Can Hail Damage Cause Structural Damage to Your Car?” and “Should You Buy a Car Damaged by Hail?”1: “Big as Hail!” contest

This contest idea came from the owner of a large local gym. RZ’s will give $500 to the local homeowner who sends in the largest piece of hail, as judged by Facebook fans, during the season. In return, the gym will promote the contest at its multiple locations, link to the content promotion page on RZ’s website, and share images of its fans holding large pieces of hail via social media.

What does the gym get in return: A catchy slogan (e.g., it’s similar to “big as hell,” popular gym parlance) to market around during the hail season.

It’s a win-win for everyone involved, especially RZ.

He gets a link, but most important he realizes how to create content to nail each one of his goals. You can do the same. All it takes is a change in mindset. Away from content creation. Toward outreach, promote and amplify.

Summary

While the story of RZ’s entirely fictional, it is based on techniques I’ve used with other small and midsize businesses. The keys, I’ve found, are to get away from thinking about your industry/brand as being boring, even if it is, and marshal the resources to find the audience who’ll benefit from from your content and, most important, identify the influencers who’ll promote and amplify it.

What are your thoughts?

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After leaving my journalism career and having studied marketing in an M.B.A. program in Boston, I moved to Israel some years ago to pursue a marcom career in the so-called “Startup Nation.” My first job, however, turned out to be at a pornography website that broadcast live “shows” for $1 a minute.

Yeah, it’s a little embarrassing. But I learned a lot –about what not to do.

Every day, I would write fake porn stories that would be stuffed with keywords and then published on an “independent” site with links to the main website. One day, I heard that Amy Fisher – the “Long Island Lolita” of the 1990sJoey Buttafuoco scandal – would be “performing” on the website. Finally, I thought, a chance to use my marketing knowledge! I outlined a few ideas on promotion and publicity – but the SEO director dismissed them with a wave of his hand.

“I’m sure themarketing department is handling that,” he said. As I understood later, I was in the SEO department. I left that job quickly. (Actually, I was doing “black-hat SEO” – in other words, spam. Of course, real SEO – “white-hat SEO” – is something entirely different. But more on that below.)

Today, I recommend that anyone who wants to get started in real digital marketing should work for a company that sells aspecific product to a specific audience. Porn, forex, and gambling websites – despite their lucrative potential salaries – are usually generic businesses that rarely differentiate themselves and instead rely on methods that try to “trick” Google. (Seriously, I just heard the other day about one company here doing what it called “black-hat PPC” to get around Google AdWords’ restrictions on its industry.) And those tricks don’t work anymore.

After leaving the porn website, I held various positions at global agencies before working now as a digital marketing and communications consultant. Today, based on the problems that I have seen and the fallacies that I have encountered, I wanted to propose a strategy to Mozzers on how marketing departments and agencies should structure themselves in light of the need to integrate traditional and Internet marketing today.

Don’t divide traditional and online marketing

In large corporations and similar companies that have been in existence for decades, digital marketing is often added as a second parallel structure alongside the historical marketing activities. The incorrect assumption is that traditional and Internet marketing are entirely different things that need entirely separate approaches. My basic example:

But such a structure can lead to major problems.

At a prior agency, we had a client who hired us for both public relations and organic social media (in addition to paid social-media advertising and conversion-rate optimization). The goal of the PR team was to get coverage of the business and its executives in major, relevant publications. The goals of the Social Media team were to generate qualified sales leads and build a large Twitter following.

However, due to the flawed decision to separate PR and social media, the extremely-large number of good Twitter followers did not come despite the company’s gaining of major coverage from outlets including Fox News,The New York Times, Forbes, Wired, and AdWeek.

Why? The PR team did not concern itself with social media, and the Social Media team did not think about public relations. There were many missed opportunities:

Press releases that were sent to reporters and influencers could have included the Twitter handle and links to the Twitter account

The PR team could have asked the Fox News’ segment producers to include the company’s Twitter handle on the bottom part of the screen when the program showed the CEO’s name and business

PR could have advised the CEO to make sure that the company’s Twitter handle was listed in the footer of presentation slides

The company’s booths at global events could have showcased the Twitter hashtag

Now, it was not the PR team’s fault – I can attest that they were intelligent, professional people. It was just not how the agency’s operations were structured as a whole. The PR team did not think about anything relating to social media because it was the Social Media team’s responsibility – and vice versa.

In a personal essay on my website, I explain how toget more good Twitter followers. First, use Followerwonk to find relevant journalists, bloggers, and influencers based on your target audience and strategic messaging and positioning. Then, incorporate Twitter naturally into your PR and publicity activities. There are no “tricks” to gaining large followings. The key to being big on social media is to become something big in the first place. The online and offline worlds reflect each other. (Rare viral cases such as “Alex From Target” are exceptions that prove the rule – “going viral” is too-rarely successful enough ever to be a solid strategy in and of itself.)

Don’t create too many silos

In contrast to larger companies with long, vertical, and parallel structures, many small businesses and startups today are extremely horizontal and flat. According to 7Geese, companies such as Morning Star and Return Path have even taken it to an extreme bystating that “no one has a boss.”

Here is another basic example of mine of how marketing departments in companies with flat philosophies are structured. Every single function is on the same level:

I once walked into the office of the CMO of an Israeli tech company that was building numerous products in various sectors. I was there to explore a consulting opportunity. Each product had an overall product marketing manager, and there were numerous, separate teams on a flat level that would each do “PR,” “SEO,” “social media,” and more for each product.

Here are a few excerpts of my conversion with the CMO:

Me: What is the function of the SEO team?

CMO: To get more links.

Me: But the PR team will get the links you need naturally.

CMO: The SEO team will buy the links that we want the most. It’s just easier and faster that way.

And then:

Me: So, you’ve got a PR team to reach out to journalists and bloggers?

CMO: Yes.

Me: What if a writer is only reachable on Twitter – will the PR or Social Media team reach out to them?

CMO: (silence)

And then:

Me: What will the Social Media team do?

CMO: Spread the word about the company’s products on social media.

Me: How will they do that by themselves without content and without essentially doing PR’s job?

CMO: (silence)

I can hear countless Mozzers groaning while reading each quote! I did not take the consulting job – the CMO was committed to the old ways of thinking that do not work anymore, and I could not convince him otherwise.

How to think about marketing functions

Important note: I know that I just said NOT to separate traditional and online marketing. In context, this earlier step-by-step infographic on how to integrate SEO and PR separated the two because the use of the differentiation was the easiest way to explain the integration process – it was not a recommendation to divide the teams themselves.

In that essay, I explained the traditional marketing and communications process in this way:

A sender decides upon a message; the message is packaged into a piece of content; the content is transmitted via a desired channel; and the channel delivers the content to the receiver. Marketing is essentially sending a message that is packaged into a piece of content to a receiver via a channel. The rest is just details.

That same theoretical idea can be applied in an actionable way in terms of how to structure a marketing department, agency, or campaign. I describe the four-fold process as such:Strategy, Creative, Communications, and Audit.

In light of this idea, I argue thatthe operations of a marketing department should flow along these four lines and not divide traditional and digital channels because the Internet is just a set of new communications channels that can be used to execute overall marketing functions.

Here is a new flowchart that outlines this overall process:

Strategy

The senior marketing executives identify the marketing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) based on the company’s overall business goals and craft a strategy accordingly. They also research the target audience and potential channels, create the overall messaging and positioning, and develop a plan of execution.

One of the prior Moz posts of mine shows how to create messaging based on the audience (a prior agency of mine took a mobile-app owner’s personal story and turned it into a media pitch)

Creative

The creative team then creates all of the marketing collateral – what is now called “content” – based on the target audience, the positioning, and the channels on which the content will appear. The content can include blog posts, landing pages, online and offline advertisements, meta titles and descriptions, sales copy, catalogues, brochures, videos, e-books, podcasts, graphics, webinars, website text, and more.

Copy aims to sell – think taglines and product descriptions. Content aims to inform – think e-books that reveal the best-practices in a target audience’s industry. The modern Creative department needs to use both.

Communications

The communications team then publicizes the marketing collateral via the desired channels. This can include paid and organic social media, print and online advertising, public relations and media relations, influencer outreach, and more.

There are many different types of communications functions – different businesses may need to use one, some, or all of them:

Public relations – Managing the flow of information from an organization to the public

Media relations – Responding to inquires from journalists and bloggers

Advertising campaigns – Running online and offline ad campaigns with the materials that were designed by the Creative department (as Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman – an advertising veteran who is a self-described critic of social media and digital ads – says in the sidebar of his website, “Creative people make the ads. Everyone else makes the arrangements”)

Audit

Account executives research and evaluate the results based on the KPIs through methods including web analytics, conversions and ROI, coverage in media outlets, lead evaluations from the sales team, and more. The Strategy team can then review the information and revise future campaigns accordingly.

Here are some resources to learn more about how to measure traditional and online marketing campaigns:

What this means for marketers

As you can see, I classify individual marketers asstrategists, creatives, communicators, or auditors. Generalists as well as marketing and communications veterans tend to make good strategists. Great writers, graphic designers, and videographers are creatives. People with experience in public relations, publicity, and community relations are communicators. Analytics experts can be auditors.

But the important thing is that each “category” of people needs to learn as much as possible about executing their functions via all needed traditional and online methods. Creatives need to focus on writing, graphics, and video. Communicators need to learn how to use all communications channels – e-mail, the telephone, social media, and more. Auditors need to understand how to measure ROI and related metrics in terms of online conversions, media hits, brand awareness, and more.

Here are three examples of how individual contributors in such a traditional marketing structure will operate in the integrated marketing world of the future:

Are you a copywriter in the Creative department? You’ll also need to learn how to craft meta titles and meta descriptions that include the desired messaging and get the reader to click to the website. You’ll need to write the text of website product pages while keeping semantic understanding and keyword themes in mind.

Are you a publicist in the Communications department? You’ll need to learn to use both traditional (the telephone) and online (e-mail and social media) channels to get media coverage, publicity, and brand awareness. You’ll need to learn about the importance of links in general and how to evaluate the value of individual links.

Are you in the Audit department? You’ll need to use traditional PR software to find the volumes of readerships of any print, TV, or online outlet. You’ll need online-mention tools to track all hits. You’ll need website analytics to see how traffic from those publications performs. You’ll need to learn how to allocate ROI values to multiple types of referring websites and the roles that they play throughout the marketing funnel.

If you run with those examples in your mind, I’m sure you’ll realize a lot more.

To the individuals who are reading this essay, I would ask yourselves the following questions to grow your career in the coming integrated world:

Am I a strategist, creative, communicator, or auditor? Most people want to be strategists, but few actually are.

What else do I need to learn to become a master in my “group” area? A personal example: I have always been a writer, but I know little about graphic design. That’s something I need to learn. Another example: A publicist might be great at e-mailing reporters, but he or she might not know how to engage with journalists on Twitter. Those are intra-group items to learn.

What “group” area should I learn next? Say you’re a genius at communications in general. What should you learn next – creative, auditing, or strategy? (Keep in mind that strategy is something that is best learned last after gaining experience in the other three fields.)

What this means for agencies

Historically, agencies have generally specialized in one or more of the four areas that I mentioned earlier: strategy, creative, communications and advertising, and auditing and troubleshooting. The same is true today – except that agencies will need to learn how to do those practices in both traditional and digital contexts.

However, digital marketers have had a habit of assigning new names and buzzwords to already-existing practices as if they are something new. I hate clickbait headlines that include the words “death” or “end,” but I am going to make an exception here because I am very passionate about this topic and want to warn the community of the gravity of the situation.

The end of “social media marketing”

If you are an agency (or a consultant) who brands yourself as a social media expert, you need to rebrand yourself. There will be no “social media” jobs in five years. Social media is just yet another communications channel that can be used to perform existing functions as well as transmit messages and content to an audience:

Customer-service representatives will use social media to do customer service

Publicists will use social media to generate publicity

Advertisers will use social media to advertise

Why is this the case? Simple. It’s easier for a customer-support representative to learn how to use Twitter than for someone who knows Twitter to learn how to give great customer service.

In truth, “content marketing” is doing what Creative, Communications, and Advertising teams have done since time immemorial. It’s nothing new. “Content marketers” also need to rebrand themselves as more and more companies and clients will begin to realize this fact. After all, one recent Nielsen study has shown thatcontent marketing is 88% less effective than public relations – likely because most content marketers do not realize that they are really doing (in part) public relations and are therefore are not doing it well.

The end of “link building”

Over the past few years, there has been much debate overwhether Google favors big brands in search results. Assuming this is the case, I would submit that the reason is merely because large companies have publicity teams that work around the clock to generate online discussions and news coverage – all of which indirectly generates millions of links.

The best link building methods are just publicity by other names. Moreover, traditional link building data such as PageRank and Domain Authority (DA) will be less and less useful as Google becomes smarter and smarter. If I sell widgets, then I want a link on a website that is read by people who like widgets – regardless of its DA. That link is more important than a link on a website that has nothing to do with widgets – even it has a vastly-higher DA.

Whenever I argue this point, traditional link builders usually respond by saying that they are needed because they are the best at ensuring that any coverage and mentions also come with links. Well, with all due respect, I respond with the statement that it’s not much of a value-adding benefit. I’d just tell existing publicists to be sure that links are added to coverage whenever possible.

In economic theory, there is a principle called ”opportunity cost.” Basically, it states that “time spent doing A is time that is spent not doing B.” In any business, there is only so much labor and time to accomplish a given task, so priorities based on ROI need to be determined. Given a time frame of three months, I’d argue that the ROI of developing and executing a publicity campaign will be far higher than spending that time fixing broken links, e-mailing countless website owners to beg for links, creating link bait, and so on.

“Link builders” will also need to rebrand themselves as more and more businesses will become wary of artificial links that may incur Google Penguin penalties. For the best results, hire PR experts instead of link builders. Links are just the by-products of good marketing and publicity.

So, what do I recommend? Stop reading articles on “how to build links.” Instead, learn everything you can about public relations, communications, and publicity. Since the other sections of this essay that focus on strategy, content, and analytics typically receive a lot of attention on Moz, I’ll provide a list of resources elsewhere on publicity. Here are some good places to start:

The end of link penalty removals

I stopped thinking about links a long time ago while I was at a prior agency job. My team and I would do the technical SEO, the creative and the publicity – and the best links would come naturally by themselves. I would not actively track links except for periodic checkups to make sure that competitors were not pointing spammy backlinks at our clients. It happens – one time, I saw a lot of link spam directed at a website with anchor text that was stuffed with keywords relating to prescription drugs. I disavowed them.

But except in that specific circumstance, I want to live in a world where link audits, link-removal software, and the Google Disavow Tool are no longer needed. For one reason, I feel bad for our collective clients. Many of us spent years making money recommending for and then building bad, artificial links – and now we’re making money to remove them. But for the most part, I want to be in an industry where we no longer build links – or even specifically think about them in general.

If you do real, bona fide publicity, then you’ll never, ever have to worry about Google Penguin penalties.

But, wait! Where’s SEO?

Now, I did not mention search-engine optimization much until now for a reason. We’re thinking about it wrongly.

Technical SEO

All technical and on-page SEO is copywriting and specialized web development. Copywriters (and sometimes content writers) should write meta titles and meta descriptions as well as website and landing-page text. The rest just comes down to web developers focusing on items ranging from XML sitemaps to mobile-responsive design to schema code.

Think about it from a financial perspective: It’s far cheaper and more efficient to hire a web developer who knows to include all of these functions rather than to hire both a web developerand an SEO.

Off-page SEO

As I described earlier in my discussion of linkbuilding, the best off-page SEO is really just public relations and publicity and should be done by a communications team rather than an SEO.

Essentially, “SEO” is a collection of best practices that can and should sit in already-existing marketing and web-development teams. As much as this thought may prove to be controversial, SEO functions should be dispersed among other jobs. Most of the time, there is little need for separate and individual “SEO” agencies, functions, and employees.

Same as it ever was

If you do this process well and do it continuously to build a strong brand over time, then everything else will take care of itself. Higher search-engine rankings. More traffic. More customers. More leads. More sales. More brand awareness. And in the end, greater revenue and profit.

There are no shortcuts – it’s just doing good marketing both online and offline together.

When you create a marketing department or team today, it’s crucial to keep this in mind – in fact, it’s what marketers have always kept in mind and the process that they have always followed. Same as it ever was. The traditional marketing practices of yesteryear are still relevant today. The only difference is that we are operating in an increasing number of available communications channels called the Internet.

I just wish I had known that fact when I had started the job at the porn website.

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This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Many of the traditional channels for online content discovery are thoroughly understood and their adoption rates are high.

The readily accepted channels—from SEO and PPC, to email and social media broadcasting—can deliver the best content to the right people at the right time.

Today, however, the Internet is experiencing a deluge of content, and many channels for content discovery are bloated. Estimates say that more than 2.73 million blog posts are written and published daily. Many industries are experiencing a content surplus, making it even more challenging for marketers to get their content seen.

Social media networks like Facebook and Twitter are adjusting their algorithms to ensure the least amount of organic visibility for brands, too. Traditional paid media, such as banner advertising, is becoming less effective year-over-year becausebanner blindness runs rampant. According to Solve Media, you’re more likely to survive a plane crash than click on a banner ad.

That sounds farfetched until you look at the results from the Nielsen Norman Groups 2007 eyetracking study (shown below).

As a result, new techniques, tactics and tools are cropping up and being used by marketers of all stripes to maximize the visibility of their content. There’s now an entirecontent promotion ecosystem. From influencer marketing to native advertising, brands are experimenting in new ways.

Many brands are sponsoring articles on blogs or other online publications with large preexisting audiences. An interesting stat we just included in our own ”Content Promotion Manifesto” is that brands spent, on average, 6.7 percent of their content marketing budgets on sponsored content in 2013. It’s trending upwards, too. From the The New York Times to Forbes’ Brand Voice, there’s no shortage of famous examples.

While
advertorials have been around for decades, this top-of-the-funnel sponsored article channel is relatively new for many content marketers. Over the last year, we have received many questions from clients about sponsored content—questions about pricing, scale, value and strategy. We struggled to answer most of them; there wasn’t anywhere to get answers.

Because of this, we decided to reach out to 550 online publications to gather as much information about their sponsored content programs as possible. We wanted to find out the following:

An agreed upon definition for sponsored articles

The current state of sponsored articles as a channel

Examples of sponsored articles

Sponsored article pricing and value

A media buying strategy for sponsored articles

Tools and platforms for sponsored articles

We quickly learned that sponsored content on blogs and other online publications, when viewed as a marketing channel, is very immature. Pricing doesn’t have much rhyme or reason, either. However, after collecting and interpreting data on 550 online properties, and dissecting countless native advertising studies, we hope to shine a light on a little known content marketing channel.

The results of the study are outlined below.

Note: The complete Media Buyers Guide to Sponsored Content study is available for download here.

Defining Sponsored Articles

With content marketing adoption rates so high, many brands are looking to native advertising to promote their content. TheInteractive Advertising Bureau (IAB) defines native advertising as “paid ads that are so cohesive with the page content, assimilated into the design, and consistent with the platform behavior that the viewer simply feels that they belong.” According to the IAB, native advertising contains six different types of ad units: in-feed, promoted listings, in-ad with native element, paid search, recommendation widgets, and custom.

Sponsored articles fall into the in-feed subgroup. However, so does promoted content on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Bcause they appear within the normal content feed of the publisher, it doesn’t matter if the publisher is Facebook or BuzzFeed.

In other words, sponsored articles amount to advertising on a media outlet in the form of editorial content that looks like it’s supposed to be there. Brands value this because association with a publication and exposure to its audience can drive awareness, traffic, conversions, and leads.

The Current State of Sponsored Articles

We uncovered lots of fascinating information about sponsored articles while conducting our research. They are actually an evolved version of what many marketers call advertorials, which have been around for decades. The biggest difference between the two is where the content resides in the customer buying journey. Advertorials are middle to bottom-of-the-funnel content.

An example of a magazine advertorial

On the other hand, sponsored articles strictly reside at the top of the funnel. Their purpose is to be helpful, entertaining, or both. Top-of-the-funnel content doesn’t appear to be salesy and brand-centric to the reader. It’s the rise of content marketing that helped move advertorials up the funnel. This helps brands become not just purveyors of goods and services, but a producer of ideas and a distributor of knowledge.

Controversy

Sponsored articles have received pushback from some publishers, brands, and consumers—and even government regulators who are concerned because the articles resemble editorial content. This can damage the editorial integrity of a publication, as well as a brand’s image.

Both publishers and marketers have a vested interest in not appearing to mislead consumers. Native advertising in general is misunderstood by many consumers and marketers. (That’s partly why we conducted this study.)

In the video below, John Oliver does a good job of articulating many consumers’ concerns regarding sponsored articles.

Copyblogger’s2014 State of Native Advertising Report surveyed over 2,000 marketers and discovered that 73 percent were either completely unfamiliar with or hardly familiar with native advertising.

Thirty-eight percent of the marketers could identify forms of native advertising from a checklist, and only three percent claimed to be very knowledgeable.

Earlier this year,Contently surveyed 542 U.S. Internet users to determine what they thought about sponsored articles. Only 48 percent of the respondents believed sponsored content that was labeled as such was paid for by an advertiser that had influenced the content produced. The rest thought the label meant something else.

Just over 66 percent of the respondents reported they are not likely to click on an article sponsored by a brand and 33 percent said they’re just as likely to click on a sponsored article as they are to click on (unsponsored) editorial content.

There is also contradictory evidence surrounding the overall effectiveness of sponsored articles.Research from Chartbeat shows that only 24 percent of visitors scroll past the fold when visiting a sponsored article—compared with 71 percent for editorial content.

However,The New York Times claims readers spend the same amount of time on sponsored articles as traditional news stories. This is backed up by a study from Sharethrough and IPG Media Labs. They found that consumers actually look at sponsored articles more than typical editorial articles (26 percent vs. 24 percent) and spend a similar amount of time on each (1 minute vs. 1.2 minutes).

Not all publishers offer sponsored article opportunities to marketers. During our research, some respondents told us that protecting editorial integrity and preserving audience trust were a higher priorities. On the other hand, many big name publishers like Forbes, The New York Times, Business Insider, The Atlantic, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have all embraced sponsored articles as a revenue source.

BuzzFeed’s entire business model is built around what it calls sponsored “listicles,” a.k.a. sponsored articles. While some publishers are averse to adopting this native form of advertising, it doesn’t seem to be causing any damage to the publishers who are using native ads.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hasn’t quite figured outhow to regulate native advertising. The FTC has delayed handing down regulations around disclosure requirements, language and graphic separation. Until that happens, the display of native advertising will remain at the discretion of publishers.

With that said, the IAB has set native advertising guidelines for its members. The IAB reports that clarity and prominence of paid native ad unit disclosure are vital, regardless of native advertising type.

Their two criteria are straightforward:

Use language that conveys the advertising has been paid for, thus making it an advertising unit, even if that unit does not contain traditional promotional advertising messages.

Be large and visible enough for a consumer to notice it in the context of a given page and/or relative to the device the ad is being viewed on.

In the case of sponsored articles, a reasonable consumer should be able to distinguish between editorial content from the publisher and paid advertising.

Growth

A 2013 survey conducted byHexagram and Spada revealed that 62 percent of publishers had embraced sponsored articles, with another 16 percent planning to go this route by the end of 2014. Comparable research from eMarketer showed that only 10 percent of digital publishers didn’t have and weren’t considering native advertising on their sites.

The2014 Native Advertising Roundup revealed that 73 percent of media buyers use native advertising, and 93 percent expect to spend the same or more in the future. Native advertising spending in the U.S. is expected to increase from $1.3 billion in 2013 to $9.4 billion in 2018. A full 40 percent of publishers expect native advertising to drive a quarter or more of their digital revenue this year.

Native advertising, when compared to traditional display ads, have been found to be more effective. 25 percent more consumers looked at sponsored articles than display ad units. Native ads produced an 18 percent lift in purchase intent and a nine percent lift for brand affinity responses.BIA/Kelsey released a study which shows brands are planning on spending more on native advertising, and publishers stand to benefit as long as they can preserve the trust and interest of their audience.

Examples of Sponsored Articles

Since look, feel, design, language and requirements of sponsored content are left up to the discretion of publishers, the presentation of sponsored content on different sites varies widely. Some publications provide brands with what can be described as a virtual microsite within the site itself. Others are more streamlined, using an article that appears as a piece of featured content but is labeled as sponsored.

Sponsored Article Pricing

There are no real standards for pricing in the digital world with regard to sponsored content. This makes budgeting for the channel very tough to do. It also makes long-term strategic execution at scale and across multiple publications a near impossibility.

While the value of sponsoring content is clearly understood by many brands, how to execute it and who to talk to in order to get it done is generally unclear. The study set out to add rhyme and reason to this burgeoning channel by exploring costs and comparing them across a broad spectrum of online publications and blogs.

This is valuable information for marketers and media buyers wishing to negotiate with online publications. It can even be used by publications that have not yet offered sponsored content opportunities to establish fair pricing.

Since publishers completely control their own pricing and standards, they maintain their own criteria for validating costs associated with sponsored articles. In today’s analytics-driven marketing culture, where channels are often compared and returns are measured, sponsoring content across several different publications can’t be so easily consolidated into a single “sponsored content” channel since each one has a unique value proposition.

This study is the industry’s first attempt to scientifically justify, quantify, and predict current going-rate prices of sponsored articles using explicit data points that can be measured for each online publication. Our goal was to create the first-ever quantitatively supported pricing standard for sponsored articles.

We hope our research puts an end to these challenges and empowers marketers with the ability to budget, negotiate, and ultimately scale the deployment of sponsored articles within their channel mix.

Research

In total, the research for this study was conducted over a five-month period of time earlier this year. It included manual outreach via email and phone to over 1,000 media outlets and blogs. The outreach resulted in responses from 550 publishers that sold sponsored article units.

The study took an unbiased approach to data inclusion and included a representative sample set. It collected data on globally-recognized publications, one-person blogs, and everything in between.

Publications were classified using the following criteria:

Content is created by more than five writers/contributors/columnists, and:

Everything that didn’t meet the above criteria was classified as a blog.

Each price collected in the study was the minimum charge for getting a sponsored article published, regardless of other pricing factors. A total of 17 factors were cited as justification for pricing schemes from the 550 publishers.

Word count: The number of words in a sponsored article

User time on page: The amount of time a typical reader spends on a web page

Links: Specifications regarding whether or not links would be provided, and if so, how many, where and whether or not they would be “nofollow” links

Lead capture: For publishers that provide links to gated assets, many charge on a per-lead basis

Impressions (CPM): Cost per thousand impressions based on historic data

Time and effort required from publication’s editorial staff

Monthly website traffic

PageRank: Often used by publishers to justify relative pricing when they run more than one media outlet

Domain Authority: Often used for publishers to justify relative pricing when they own more than one publication

Page-level engagement: A metric that is measured by how far readers scroll down the page and the amount of time spent on a given article

Social media promotion: Often an optional add-on that would increase price (may come as part of a package deal)

Email promotion: Often an optional add-on that would increase price (may come as part of a package deal)

Display advertising: Often an optional add-on that would increase price (may come as part of a package deal)

Number of articles: How many sponsored articles you are buying at a time

Visibility time: The amount of time an article stays live on the site

Verticals: For large publications that cover many verticals or subject areas, some verticals are more expensive than others

Pay-per-click: Another engagement-level metric that is measured by the number of click-throughs to an intended landing page

In order to do a quantitative analysis, explicit data was collected from all of the publications to calculate predictor variables. Those variables included:

Domain Authority: A ranking score from Moz, on a 100-point scale, that uses more than 40 signals to calculate how well a website will perform in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher the score, the more authoritative the website is viewed as being.

Page Authority: Another ranking score from Moz, on a 100-point scale, that calculates how well a given webpage is likely to rank in the SERPs. In the case of this study, the publication’s home pages were used.

PageRank: A ranking metric from Google that calculates the relevance of a webpage. This score analyzes the number of incoming links and the quality of the referring webpages to generate a measurement between 0 (low relevance) and 10 (high relevance).

AlexaRank: A ranking score from Alexa.com that is based on traffic data from users over a rolling three-month period. A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of unique visitors and page views. The site with the greatest combination of these is ranked No. 1, and higher number rankings correlate with lower traffic data.

Facebook Following: The number of fans (or “likes”) a publication’s Facebook page has.

Twitter Following: The number of followers a publication’s or a blogger’s Twitter account has. For publications with multiple accounts and/or contributing authors, only the account with the largest following was used.

Pinterest Following: The number of followers a publication’s or a blogger’s Pinterest account has.

Assumptions

It is assumed that the data set in this study is a representative sample of the entire ecosystem of blogs and other online publications because the results closely mirror Moz’sdistribution of Page Authority that analyzed more than 10,000 SERPs and 200,000 unique pages. This regression model had a mean (average) Page Authority of 40.8 and standard deviation of 15.1. The distribution can be seen below.

The regression model in this study had a mean of 47.1 and a standard deviation of 15.5. The sample set of blogs and publications had a slightly higher Page Authority than the Moz study. This was expected because the study only measured root domains and not long-tail pages within those domains.

Aside from that slight disparity, the distribution curves are nearly identical. For those readers who are number junkies, the descriptive statistics of the Page Authority data in the study are below.

Limitations

Variations in sponsored content offerings – The study established the pricing baseline based on the cost of one sponsored article. Since some publications only offered long-term commitments to marketers that could include other benefits (banners, email, social promotion, etc.), some publications’ unit pricing could be inflated. As a result, the regression model may not be an accurate price predictor in all scenarios.

Social account data – Not all online publications have accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. In these cases, the number zero was used to quantify followers. Also, for publications with multiple accounts on the same network, the study measured the account with the most followers.

Alexa Rank Inaccuracies – Alexa admits publicly that there are limits to making judgments from its data. Sites with relatively low traffic may not be accurately measured by Alexa.

Analysis

The graph below seeks to show the exact methodology we used to conduct the sponsored content pricing study. It’s purpose is to give readers confidence in our pricing models so they feel comfortable in adapting the formulas.

When all prices are graphed, bloat appears on each end of the pricing spectrum. In order to reconcile the dense areas, the study broke down the pricing data and regression models for blogs and publications separately.

Blog Pricing Analysis

The graph below represents the distribution of prices for all 474 blogs in the study.

Because of the wide range and low frequency of prices recorded in the “more” area, we decided to label these data points as outliers. By removing the outliers (approximately 3.8 percent of the sample) from the analysis, the variance decreased by 87 percent, making for a more accurate predictive model. All descriptive statistics for the blog data sample before and after removing the outliers were laid out in the study.

With the remaining 456 cases, a multi-variable regression test for price against all of the predictor variables was run, after which the insignificant variables were removed to formulate the pricing regression model for blogs, as shown below.

The end result confidently determined the fair market price formula for a sponsored article on a blog:

Publication Pricing Analysis

The graph below represents the distribution of pricing for all 76 publications recorded in the study.

The outliers were kept in this regression model because of the range in quality and size of online publications is large. The descriptive statistics are available in the actual study.

Following the same methods as the blog analysis, the study ran a multi-variable regression test to construct a predictive model for publication pricing. After removing the insignificant variables the output looks like this:

The end result confidently determines the fair market price formula for a sponsored article on a publication:

What All This Math Really Boils Down To

With the formulas below, marketers now have a way to assign value when purchasing or negotiating for sponsored articles on blogs or publications.

Prior to this study marketers had no way of knowing if they were getting a fair deal or not using this emerging channel.

That said, media buyers should also note that many top-tier publications package their sponsored content offering in different ways. Keep this in mind when using the formulas above. Below are examples of some variation in sponsored article packages.

Networks and Tools for Sponsored Articles

While conducting research, several tools and networks kept coming up. Some networks set up for the sole purpose of connecting marketers with publishers for sponsored content. Even HubSpot has built an informal ad hoc network for its partner agencies to connect with its publishing customers. Content measurement tools, includingNudge, which was built to measure sponsored content, are starting to crop up, too.

A few other networks and tools worth noting:

Adproval: A media outlet marketplace for connecting publishers and advertisers

BlogHer: A blog and social media influencer community focused on social media coverage of women

Blogsvertise: A blog marketplace for connecting publishers and advertisers

Buysellads: A media outlet marketplace for connecting publishers and advertisers

Cision: The brand’s Content Marketing Database includes a searchable database of over 2,000 sponsored opportunities with thousands of U.S. publications

Izea: A sponsorship marketplace that connects social media influencers with brands

Markerly: A brand amplification platform that connects brands with bloggers

Sway Group: Connects brands and agencies with the largest network of female bloggers on the Web

The Syndicate: A brand storytelling partner and blog sponsorship network.

With the growth of online content showing no signs of slowing, the use of sponsored content as a marketing channel will undoubtedly continue to grow as well. Besides, it’s a proven revenue stream for publishers who have often struggled to make money on the Internet.

However, as the popularity of sponsored content grows, so does the likelihood of it being regulated by governments. Until then, consider this post your definitive guide to sponsored content. The study can bedownloaded here.

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Another year in search has passed. It’s now 2015 and we have seen some major changes in local ranking factors since 2014, which I also expect to change greatly throughout 2015. For some a new year means a fresh starting point and yet for others it’s a time of reflection to analyze how successful your campaign has been. Whatever boat you’re in, make sure to sit down and read this guide.

In this guide we will cover how you can have a successful local SEO campaign in 2015 starting with the basics and getting down to five action items you should focus on now. This is not limited to Google My Business and also includes localized organic results.

Now the question is where do you start?

Since Pigeon has now rolled out to the US, UK, Australia, and Canada it’s important to make sure your strategies are in line with this no matter what part of the world you’re in. A successful local SEO Campaign in 2015 will be much more successful if you put more work into it. Don’t be fooled though. More work by itself isn’t going to get you where you need to be. You need to work smarter towards the goals which are going to fuel your conversions.

For some industries that might mean more localized content, for others it may mean more social interaction in your local area. Whatever it ends up being, the root of it should be the same for most. You need to get more conversions for your website or your client’s website. So with this in mind let’s make sure we’re on the same page as far as our goals are concerned.

Things you need to know first

Focus on the right goals

Recently I had a conversation with a client who wanted to really nail in the point thathe was not interested in traffic. He was interested in the conversions he could track. He was also interested to see how all of these content resource pieces I recommended would help. He was tired of the silly graphs from other agencies that showed great rankings on a variety of keywords when he was more interested to see which efforts brought him the most value. Instead, he wanted to see how his campaign was bringing him conversions or meaningful traffic. I really appreciated this statement and I felt like he really got it.

Still, however, far too often I have to talk to potential clients and explain to them why their sexy looking traffic reports aren’t actually helping them. You can have all of the traffic in the world but if it doesn’t meet one of your goals of conversions or education then it’s probably not helping. Even if you make the client happy with your snazzy reports for a few months, eventually they’re going to want to know their return on investment (ROI).

It’s 2015. If your clients aren’t tracking conversions properly, give them the help they need. Record their contacts in a CRM and track the source of each of these contacts. Track them all the way through the sales funnel.

That’s a simple and basic marketing example but as SEOsyour role has transformed. If you can show this type of actual value and develop a plan accordingly, you will be unstoppable.

Second, don’t get tunnel vision

You may wonder why I started a little more basic than normal in this post. The fact is that in this industry there is not a full formal training program that covers all aspects of what we do.

We all come from different walks of life and experience which makes it easy for us to get tunnel vision. You probably opened this article with the idea of “How Can I Dominate My Google Local Rankings?” While we cover some actionable tips you should be using, you need to think outside of the box as well. Your website is not the only online property you need to be concerned about.

Mike Ramsey from Nifty Marketing put out a great study on measuring the click-through rates from the new local stack. In this study he measured click-through rates of users conducting several different searches like “Salt Lake City Hotel” in the example below. With so many different options look where the users are clicking:

They’re really clicking all over the place! While it’s cool to be number one, it’s much better if you get clicks from your paid ad, organic result, local result, and barnacle SEO efforts (which we’ll talk about a little later).

If you combine your conversion marketing data with your biggest priorities, you can put together a plan to tackle the most important areas for your industry. Don’t assume it’s a one-size-fits-all approach.

Third, some spam still works. Don’t do it and rise above it.

There’s no doubt that some spammy tactics are still working. Google gets better everyday but you still see craplike this example below show up in the SERPs.

While it sucks to see that kind of stuff, remember that in time it disappears (just as it did before this article was published). If you take shortcuts, you’re going to get caught and it’s not worth it for the client or the heartache on your site. Maintain the course and do things the right way.

Now let’s get tactical and prepare for 2015

Now it’s time for some practical and tactical takeaways you can use to dominate your local search campaign in 2015.

Practical tip 1: start with an audit

Over the years, one of the best lessons I have learned is it’s OK to say “I don’t know” when you don’t have the answer. Consulting with industry experts or people with more experience than you is not a bad thing and will likely only lead to you to enhance your knowledge and get a different perspective. It can be humbling but the experience is amazing. It can open your mind.

Last year, I had the opportunity to work with over ten of the industry’s best minds and retained them for site audits on different matters.

The perspective this gives is absolutely incredible and I believe it’s a great way to learn. Everyone in this industry has come from a different background and seen different things over the years. Combining that knowledge is invaluable to the success of your clients’ projects. Don’t be afraid to do it and learn from it. This is also a good idea if you feel like your project has reached a stalemate. Getting more advice, identifying potential problems, and having a fresh perspective will do wonders for your success.

As many of the experts have confirmed, ever since the Pigeon update, organic and local ranking factors have been more tied together than ever. Since they started going this direction in a big way, I would not expect it to stop.

This means that you really do need to worry about things like site speed, content, penalties, mobile compatibility, site structure, and more. On a side note, guess what will happen to your organic results if you keep this as a top priority? They will flourish and you will thank me.

If you don’t have the budget or resources to get a third party opinion, you can also conduct an independent audit.

Do it yourself organic SEO audit resources:

Whatever your situation is, it’s worth the time to have this perspective yearly or even a couple times a year if possible.

Practical tip 2: consider behavioral signals and optimize accordingly

I remember having a conversation with Darren Shaw, the founder of Whitespark, at MozCon 2013 about his thoughts on user behavior affecting local results. At the time I didn’t do too much testing around it. However just this year, Darren had a mind-blowing presentation at the Dallas State of Search where he threw in the behavioral signals curve ball. Phil Rozek also spoke about behavioral signals and provided a great slide deck with actionable items (included below).

We have always speculated on behavioral signals but between his tests and some of Rand’s IMEC Lab tests, I became more of a believer last year. Now, before we go too deep on this remember that your local campaign is NOT only focused on just your local pack results. If user behavior can have an impact on search results, we should definitely be optimizing for our users.

Don’t just optimize for the engines, optimize for the humans. One day when Skynet is around this may not be an issue, but for now you need to do it.

So how can you optimize for behavioral signals?

There is a dark side and a light side path to this question. If you ask me I will always say follow the light side as it will be effective and you don’t have to worry about being penalized. That’s a serious issue and it’s unethical for you to put your clients in that position.

Local SEO: how to optimize for behavioral signals

Do you remember the click-through study we looked at a bit earlier from Nifty Marketing? Do you remember where the users clicked? If you look again or just analyze user and shopper behavior, you might notice that many of the results with the most reviews got clicks. We know that reviews are hard to get so here are two quick ways that I use and recommend to my clients:

1. Solicit your Gmail clients for reviews

If you have a list of happy Gmail clients you can simply send them an email with a direct link to your Google My Business Page. Just get the URL of your local page by pulling up your URL and copying and pasting it. A URL will look like the one below:

Once you have this URL, simply remove the /posts and replace it with:

/?hl=en&review=1

It will look like this:

If your clients click on this link via their logged-in Gmail, they will automatically be taken to the review page which will open up the box to leave a review which looks like the example below. It doesn’t get much more simple than that.

2. Check out a service like Mike Blumenthal’s Get Five Stars for reviews

I recently used this with a client and got a lot of great feedback and several reviews.

Remember that these reviews will also help on third-party sites and can help your Google My Business ranking positions as well as click-through rates. You cancheck out Get Five Stars Here.

Another way outside of getting reviews is to optimize the appearance of your Google My Business Page.

3. Optimize your local photos

Your Google My Business page includes photos. Don’t use generic photos. Use high quality photos so when the users hover over your listing they get an accurate representation of what they’re looking for. Doing this will increase your click-through rate.

Organic SEO: Optimize for Behavioral Signals

The optimization for click-through rates on organic results typically focus on three areas. While you’re likely very familiar with the first two, you should not ignore them.

1. Title tags: optimize them for the user and engine

Optimize your meta title tags to increase click-through rates. Each page should have a unique title tag and should help the viewer with their query. The example below (although fabricated) is a good example of what NOT to do.

2. Meta descriptions: optimize them for the user

Optimize your meta description to get the user to click on the search result. If you’re not doing this just because Google may or may not pull it, you’re missing opportunities and clicks.

3. Review Schema markup: add this to appropriate pages

ReviewingSchema markup is still a very overlooked opportunity. Like we talked about above in the local section, if you don’t have reviews coded in Schema, you could be missing out on getting the orange stars in organic results.

Practical tip 3: don’t ignore barnacle SEO

I firmly believe that most people are not taking advantage of barnacle SEO still to this day and I’m a big fan. When I first heard Will Scott introduce this term at Pubcon I thought it was spot on. According to Will Scott’s website Search Influence, barnacle SEO is “attaching oneself to a large fixed object and waiting for the customers to float by in the current.” In a nutshell, we know that if you’re trying to rank on page one of Google you will find others that you may be able to attach to. If Yelp results come up for a lot of your search terms you might identify that as an opportunity. But there are three main ways you can take advantage of this.

1. You can try to have the most visible profile on that third party page

If Yelp is ranking for LA Personal Injury Attorneys, it would suit you to figure out how the top users are showing up there. Maybe your customers are headed there and then doing some shopping and making a selection. Or maybe they’re using it for a research platform and then will visit your website. If your profile looks great and shows up high on the list, you just gave yourself a better chance at getting a conversion.

2. You can try to get your page to rank

Hey, just because you don’t own Yelp.com or whatever similar site you’ve found, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put in the effort to have it rank. If Google is already showing you that they trust a third party site by ranking it, you can use similar organic ranking techniques that you would use on your own site to make your profile page stronger. Over time you might add this to your bio on interviews or other websites to earn links. If you increase the visibility of your profile on search engines and they see your website on the same page you might increase conversions.

3. You can help your Google My Business

If the site you’re using passes link juice and you earn links to the third party profile page, you will start to see some strong results. Links are a big factor in local since Pigeon this year and it’s an opportunity that should not be missed.

So how can you use this advice?

Start by finding a list of potential barnacle SEO partners for your industry. As an example, I did a search for “Personal Injury Attorneys” in Los Angeles. In addition to the law firms that showed up in the results on the first page, I also identified four additional places I may be able to show up on.

Yelp

Thumbtack

Avvo

Wikipedia

If you were attorney, it would be worth your while to explore these and see if any make sense for you to contribute to.

Practical tip 4: earn some good links

Most people get too carried away with link building. I know because I used to do it. The key with link building is to change your approach to understand thatit’s always better to get fewer high quality links than hundreds or thousands of low quality links.

For example, a link like this one that one of our clients earned is what I’m talking about.

If you want to increase your local rankings you can do so by earning these links to your associated Google My Business landing page.

Do you know the URL you entered in your Google My Business page when you set it up? That’s the one I’m talking about. In most cases this will be linked to either a local landing page for that location or the home page. It’s essential to your success that you earn solid links to this page.

Ensure there are no incorrect citations with wrong phone numbers, old addresses, etc.

You can ignore small differences and inconsistencies like St vs. Street. I believe the importance of citations has been greatly reduced over the past year. At the same time, you still want to be the least imperfect and provide your customers with accurate information if they’re looking on third party websites.

Let’s do good things in 2015

2014 was a tough year in search altogether. We had ups like Penguin refreshes and we had downs like the removal of authorship. I’m guessing 2015 will be no different. Staying on the roller coaster and keeping with the idea of having the “least imperfect” site is the best way to ring out the new year and march on moving forward. If you had a tough year in local search, keep your head up high, fix any existing issues, and sprint through this year by making positive changes to your site.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

I’d argue that our most beneficial adaptation was our propensity to be social. While many other animals are also social to some degree, humans combined the advantages of the pack for defense and hunting with a brain capacity that allowed advanced levels of communication.

That social instinct combined with speech gave us an extraordinary survival ability that led to us becoming the dominant species on the planet.

This article isn’t a science lesson, but I’m proposing thatunderstanding the social and interpersonal aspect of our humanity is crucial to effective marketing.

Now that may seem like a “duh” to many of you. You get that in this social web era brands need to be more “human” and be more “engaging,” that they need to foster real “conversations.” However, in this article I’m going to contend that no brand is really fully tapping into the potential of any of those social marketing aspects until they are doing so with real people: actual company representatives who become the “face” for that company in its content and social media interactions.

I intend this as a follow-up and further development of my last two articles for Moz:

Both of those articles were about Google Authorship, a Google Search feature that no longer exists. Yet it is my strong belief that the principal value of Authorship is alive and well. That is, there is tremendous value in having a recognized personal brand with trusted, authoritative content, connected to your company brand.

This article will explore that principle value in four parts:

The power of a social brand

The power of brand EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness)

The power of the personal for social EAT

Putting the power to work

Parts one and two are introductory. They lay the groundwork for what I see corporate personal brands doing most effectively. If you think you have a good understanding of why brands need to be social, and how expertise-authority-trustworthiness contribute to real business goals, then feel free to skip straight to part three.

Parts three and four demonstrate how the power of a social brand that understands the value of expertise, authority, and trust can be supercharged by tying itself to powerful personal brands.

1. The power of a social brand

Before I build this out any further, I want to distinguish between what I’m calling a “social brand” and the popular term “social business.” A social business is defined either as a business that invests heavily in social causes, or as a business that encourages its employees to be active online on behalf of the business. The latter type of social business is probably more effective in being a social brand, but it is not necessary to be a social business to be a social brand.

So what do I mean by a social brand? Simply this: a social brand is a brand that actively pursues use of online social platforms for the purposes of marketing and branding by taking advantage of the full spectrum of social interactions. In other words, a social brand does not just post to social networks. It actively engages there, seeking to enter into and create relevant conversations with real people.

Coca-Cola and Denny’s Restaurants are examples of social brands by that definition. Coke’s Hub Network command center follows a listen > analyze > engage process to catch relevant online conversations, quickly assess whether Coke has something to contributed, and when it does, create social engagements that enhance the conversation and win the brand new fans and friends.

Denny’s has a much smaller social team, yet they have proven themselves just as agile and creative as Coca-Cola in developing conversations around their brand. They built on the idea that the kinds of conversations people have online are similar to the chats people have with friends around a diner table to develop their “America’s Diner” brand.

In both cases, these brands were able to use social conversations to enhance and reinforce the kinds of associations they wanted people to have with their brands.

On social networks brands have the opportunity to share content and engage in conversations that build the expertise, authority, and trust that make real people more likely to buy from them when that moment of decision comes. In the next section, we’ll explore the value all that brings to a brand.

2. The power of brand EAT

What is brand EAT? The EAT acronym comes from the most recent version of the perennially-leaked Google Quality Rating Guidelines, the handbook for training the humans who help evaluate how well Google’s algorithm does at assessing the quality of web sites. Google now wants those evaluators to focus on three main quality criteria: Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (hence EAT).

Even though those are criteria for determining quality as a search ranking factor, we should realize that Google emphasizes them because they are the “in real life” factors that affect how real people evaluate not only web pages, but entire brands. Let’s briefly explore each factor.

Expertise

People want to do business with brands that seem to know what they are talking about. Even though it’s generally cheaper and more convenient for my wife and me to deal through big box home improvement chains, we go to our local independent hardware store whenever possible. Why? We got tired of sales people at the big box stores who knew less than we did about paint or roofing materials or lighting fixtures. Our local storefront hardware supplier has won our loyalty and business because he’s always able to answer our questions.

It can work the same way online. I’m severely graphically challenged. When it comes to creating effective visuals for my content, I’m a great nuclear physicist (and I had to look up how to spell nuclear!). But via some social media shares I ran across the very helpful design tutorials at Canva.com. Those guides were so helpful, they caused me to want to look into Canva’s user-friendly image creation tool. And now I’m a loyal customer.

Authority

Authority is expertise taken to the next level. You can be an expert in your topic and just be crying out in the desert, but when people start listening to you, recommending you, and resharing what you say, you’ve graduated to the authority level.

At the risk of being slightly sycophantic to my publisher, I’ll point to the Moz brand as being a recognized authority. Through the high level of content associated with Moz, whether on this blog, in Whiteboard Friday videos, or at conferences, a great many people have high confidence in pointing to Moz and having their own names associated with Moz in the areas of SEO and digital marketing in general.

When I’ve published here in the past, I noticed that within seconds of my post going live, people were already sharing it on social media. Given the length of my posts, they can’t possibly have read them in that time! But that’s where the Moz authority kicks in. People have learned to have confidence that if Moz publishes it, it must be good. And so they hit that share button even before they read. Of course, that makes me always want to bring my A game when I write here!

The value for Moz is that the authority generated by their high quality content gets associated with the tools and services they sell.

Trustworthiness

It’s difficult to tease out trustworthiness from the other two factors, as it seems to me to be a natural by-product of expertise and authority. In other words, people are willing to place their trust in a brand that has helped them, enriched their life in some way, or to which others they trust point as being worthwhile.

Just as in human relationships, brand trust is never instantaneous. It has to be earned over time. And so I might propose that trustworthiness is the time dimension of the expertise and authority factors. Another way of saying that: trustworthiness is reliable expertise leading to true authority expressed consistently over time.

If you’re a regular consumer of content online, inevitably you’ve reached a point when you had to make decisions about whom you’re going to give your limited attention. Brands that have achieved trustworthiness with you are far more likely to be on that short list. And they are therefore much more likely to be top-of-mind when you are in the marketplace.

The missing dimension

As important as expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are for establishing quality, standing alone I believe they lack something that could bring them to life and make a brand truly stand out from the crowd. In the next section I’ll unveil that missing dimension.

3. The power of the personal for social EAT

The fourth dimension

Back in elementary school you probably learned that we live in a three-dimensional world. The dimensions of length, width, and height create space, the place in which we live and move and have our being. When you advanced further in your education, you probably heard, though, that a universe does not exist by space alone. Space must be accompanied by a vital fourth dimension: time. Time allows for motion within space, and everything we know and love comes from that.

I believe the three “EAT” dimensions described above (expertise, authority, trustworthiness) also need a fourth dimension to bring them to life and set them in motion.

That fourth dimension is the personal.

What makes us humans

Remember my little evolution lesson at the top of this article? I highlighted two characteristics of humans that contributed powerfully to our ability to survive and thrive:

Our innate desire to be together, especially with our families and tribes.

Our ability to communicate.

Together, those two factors not only contributed to human survival and development, but eventually enabled what we call civilization.

While most marketers don’t have goals quite as lofty as civilization building, we do want to do more than survive. We want to build our own brand empires, so to speak. In that endeavor, the social and communicative aspects of humanity are our allies, just as they were to the very creation of humanity.

Face up to it

Take a look at the image below. What do you see?

Of course, it’s a common US electrical outlet. But I’m betting you couldn’t help seeing a human face. The mere suggestion of two eyes and a mouth in the right configuration, surrounded by a circle, and our brain fills in the rest. What’s more, doesn’t this “face” suggest to you some emotion? Perhaps fright, or dismay? Pretty powerful for a piece of plastic from a hardware store!

Scientists call this phenomenon pareidolia. It’s the persistent human tendency to see human faces even in inanimate objects. The fact is that as humans we are powerfully drawn to other humans. So powerfully that we often project human attributes on to non-human things. That’s why we can even speak of “humanizing” brands, brand “personalities,” and brands being “social.”

But even though it is possible for faceless brands to achieve a certain level of humanization and socialization, there is no substitute for the real thing. That is, the power of human connection is most powerful when it occurs between two or more real human beings.

Even Google understood it

Even though Google recently abandoned its Google Authorship program that displayed a face photo (sometimes) and a byline name in search results for content by qualified authors, the fact that the experiment lasted three full years demonstrates that Google understands the power of a personal connection.

I find it interesting that Google has retained Authorship-style snippets in personalized (logged-in to a Google+ account) searches for Google+ posts by people you have circled.

That means that even if Google decided Authorship snippets were too much for regular search, seeing a name and a face are still powerful and useful signalsif that name and face are familiar to the searcher.

So it stands to reason that when a real face and name become associated with authoritative, trustworthy content, people will more naturally make a personal connection with that content. And they will look for that same face in the crowd when they need to know more.

Let our powers combine!

Let’s put this all together now.

We’ve already seen the power of EAT, that a combination of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness adds up to real value, something Google thinks worth recommending as a valuable exchange for your time after you click.

We’ve also seen that humans connect most easily and naturally with other humans, and those associations can be long-lasting and sought after when accompanied by the EAT attributes.

So here’s the simple idea, the thesis of this entire article:Your brand will most rapidly and successfully gain the social trust of its audience when it is closely associated with powerful personal brands.

The long journey home

When your brand begins to market, a journey has begun. You hope to get prospects to join you in your journey. Your authoritative, relevant content is the table you set to entice those prospects to board your train. But you still need to extend an invitation, and invitations are most powerful when they come from someone we know and trust.

It’s the difference between getting a flyer in my mail box inviting me to try out a new restaurant, and a friend calling me up to ask me to come along with him to check it out. I’m much more likely to go in the latter case. Now imagine how much more powerful that invitation would be if my friend were a respected restaurant critic, who had already visited the eatery and was now telling me I shouldn’t miss it!

Why wouldn’t you be using the method that is more likely to get more people on board your brand train faster, and with more confidence about their decision.

A challenge to all brands

Before I get into my recommendations for how to put the power of personal brands to work for your brand, I want to issue a challenge.

I know what I’m asking here seems like a huge hurdle for many brand marketers. Once upon a time all you had to do was put ads in the right places and hope the right people would see them and be moved by them. Then along came the Internet and search engines, and suddenly you had to be producing authoritative content to attract traffic and give that traffic the confidence to buy from you.

You’d no sooner put in the hard work and investment to build all that content then along came the social web. Now you’ve got to make personal connections with your prospects and engage them in ways that they will pay attention to your content, come to trust your brand, and eventually become customers.

In some ways the journey has become longer, but it can also be much more richly rewarding. Helpful, engaging content channeled through social connections can bring exactly the right people to your cash register at exactly the right time.

And now I come along wanting to add more engines to your already hard-working customer journey train. But I wouldn’t ask you to do that unless I myself had seen how much faster those new engines can drive the train.

Here’s my challenge: In the coming year,hire and/or cultivate from within at least one powerful personal brand intimately associated with your brand who represents you via his or her content and social presence. Make this one of your highest marketing priorities.

I believe with all my heart and mind that as the great battle for attention heats up in the years to come, those brands that had the courage and foresight to put their best personal brand representatives on the front lines will emerge the winners.

Objections, Your Honor!

Whenever I push this challenge, whether while speaking at a conference or conferring with a client, I tend to get the same objections to the proposal that brands put real people front and center in their marketing:

Wouldn’t it be better for our content to be branded with our company name/logo?

When social media started to become an emerging marketing channel in 2006, Erica Campbell Byrum couldn’t even access it because of IT department blocks at her company. She tirelessly campaigned for the value of social media, and eventually won over senior management.

She went on to create and champion online brand ambassadors for each of their 65 offices around the country. Erica always set the example and model, steadily building her own online audience. Based on overwhelmingly positive data showing how here efforts brought ForRent and Homes.com real business, the company expanded her responsibilities to oversee a 20-person social media team.

Erica is now the unmistakable face of the ForRent and Homes.com brands. Her engaging social presence led to invitations to speak at huge industry events, and eventually to New York Times Best Selling author Jay Baer selecting her to co-author his latest book, Youtility for Real Estate, vastly increasing her “youtility” to the brands she represents.

As an anchor for KOMU-TV news, Sarah Hill made TV journalism history when she became the first television newsperson to incorporate Google+ Hangouts and Google Glass into her online newscasts. She became an early Google+ celebrity, where she now has 2.7 million followers. She went on to become the live video spokesperson for Veterans United Network, a mortgage lending service for US military veterans. She used her journalism skills combined with her vast social following and reputation to create a strong association between VUN and various veterans causes. As a result, VUN has become a first choice for veterans looking to buy homes.

Space doesn’t allow for dozens more stories I could include, but here’s a list from Rand Fishkin of people he knows whose powerful personal brands helped build their company’s brands: Heather Brunner at WPEngine, Hilary Mason formerly of Bitly, Oli Gardner with Unbounce, Caterina Fake at Flickr now Findery, Dan Shapiro at Robot Turtles, Sean Ellis of Qualaroo, Marie Steinthaler of HopsterTV. (Rand told me he had to stop the list there or he could go on all day!)

How to make best use of personal brands for your brand

Now on to how to make this work for you and your company. My recommendations are based both on my own experience as well as my careful observations of top-performing personal brands like those listed above.

The Right Stuff

When I look at people who have built influential personal brands and try to assess their common qualities, the old nature vs. nurture conundrum always surfaces. Does someone have to have an innate gift and the right personality qualities to be effective in this role? I won’t try to solve that here, but whether natural or developed, people who do well representing their brands in public tend to exhibit the following characteristics:

Likability. I put this first because even though it is the hardest characteristic to quantify, given how much the effectiveness of a personal brand is dependent on the ability to make personal connections, the tendency to be well-liked is key. That doesn’t at all mean someone who sacrifices personal integrity or refuses to take a stand in order to “win friends and influence people.” A truly likable person can maintain relational ties even through disagreements.

Smarts. By this I mean the person has to have a deep understanding of your business and your marketplace. They really should be an expert in at least some aspect of your business. You’re looking for the kind of person who in a press conference or Q&A session could authoritatively answer most any question thrown at him or her.

Gift of gab. Here I don’t mean “chatty,” but rather someone who truly enjoys getting into conversations about his or her passions and interests. They should feel comfortable in front of a camera or life audience. She or he should also have the ability to create coherent, compelling content that displays your brand’s attributes and expertise.

Integrity. This person should be someone you trust enough to be on their own without bringing embarrassment to your brand. For a personal brand to be effective, the person can’t be babysat every moment. They need to have the flexibility to respond and engage when the opportunity arises, without having to vet everything through the home office.

Remember that your hope is for the qualities of the personal brands representing your business to “rub off” on your brand. People will make this transference quite naturally, so make sure you have the right people in place.

Insource vs. Outsource

The first question you’ll face once you are convinced of the value of developing personal brands for your company is whether to develop them from within or recruit them (or even outsource entirely).

In my experience developing your personal brand representatives from within, from existing employees, is going to have the most impact and be most effective. Your own people know your brand best and (we hope!) will have real passion for it. The advantage here is that training is minimal so content creation and social audience building can commence immediately. The only downside I see is that many companies, especially smaller ones, may not have a person who fits the bill readily at hand.

In such a case it may be necessary to recruit someone who can become your personal brand representative. In fact, that’s how I ended up representing Stone Temple Consulting. CEO Eric Enge had come to know me online. While he was already a very effective personal brand for STC in his own right, Eric had grown the company to a place where he was ready to expand its inbound marketing efforts. He saw that the content I was producing and the audience I had attracted were both highly relevant to and valuable for Stone Temple. So he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: come be yourself for us. I’m pretty good at being myself, so I accepted (and haven’t regretted it for a moment!).

The least desirable choice, in my opinion, is completely outsourcing your personal brand representation. In other words, hiring a freelancer to create content and speak and engage on behalf of your brand. This might be better than nothing, but since I believe the best personal brand representatives grow out of a vital relationship with the brand they represent, I doubt it can be as effective. Your best bet here might be simply to get some recognized subject matter experts to publish content on your site, rather than try to palm them off as actually representing you. Inauthenticity gets sniffed out way too quickly these days.

Even if you don’t currently have any in-house, ready-for-prime-time stars in your stable, I would invest in ferreting them out and nurturing them to where they can do the job.

Give them creative space

If a personal brand representative is going to be effective for you, they have to have the freedom to create and experiment. Of course, that doesn’t mean without any guidelines or boundaries, but if you give your representatives too little freedom and initiative, you risk squashing the very thing that would make them most productive for you.

Make sure you have a good, clear mutual agreement with your personal brand rep of how your brand is to be represented. He or she should feel completely at home with your brand’s values, chief goals, and tone.

It’s also important that you give your representative the time they need to do their job. If you’re serious about getting the most benefit for your company from what they do, then their work as your representative should be their primary—perhaps only—responsibility. Creating great content and engaging with your audiences both take a lot of time to do well.

Make the brand connection clear, but subtle

Because you’re obviously hoping for the reputation, trust, and authority your personal brand representative builds to reflect on your brand, you might be tempted to push the connection too hard. By that I mean pressuring the representative to mention your brand frequently or even to be “selly” in her or his content and engagements.

In my experience that’s a mistake. If you push the corporate connection or sales pitch too hard, you kill the goose laying the golden eggs. You destroy the very thing that makes a personal brand so powerful. People have to be able to make a sincere and personal connection with the representative first, not with your brand. Once that connection is made, the connections to your brand will be obvious and much more meaningful. People will see that his or her content is home-based on your site, and of course your brand will be clear on all the profiles of your reps.

If you let people make the connection on their own, the transference of their trust in and liking for your reps over to your brand will occur more naturally, and therefore will be more “sticky.”

Multiply the connection opportunities

This recommendation is closely tied with the one about giving your representatives enough creative space and time to do their work well. In addition, make available to them multi-faceted, multi-channel opportunities to gain exposure. This is one of the secret weapons of real personal brad representatives: they can get into places where your brand logo never would.

For example, set aside budget to get your reps to important conferences. As they gain reputation and stature, they will get opportunities to speak at such events. Never underestimate the value of these in-real-life opportunities. Though they may not seem to have the potential reach of things like social media posting, they can be just as effective, sometimes more so. While Eric Enge and I believe that our content and social media presences help create fertile ground for business opportunities, we know that we have landed many of our best clients through our conference appearances.

You should also encourage your reps to take opportunities to get in front of other people’s audiences online. Whether by guest posting or being interviewed on podcasts, Hangouts, or other media shows, such occasions are yet another way where personal brands can get exposure in places to which you otherwise would have no access.

Your turn

Have you built an effective personal brand? If so, how has it benefited your company? Do you see it as worth the investment?

If you haven’t taken advantage of personal brands to help market your business, why not? What fears or concerns hold you back?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

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One month ago I had a crazy idea: analyzing one year of Moz Q&As, and Trevor was even crazier accepting it.

My original idea was both to understand the most common issues the Moz Community discusses and asks for help with, and also to understand how the trends in our industry are reflected in Q&A.

After the first few days of digging into the data, though, I started seeing that there was a problem: a sub-optimal Q&A structure is preventing a truly accurate analysis of the same.

For this reason, this post has been conceived as a two part series:

Auditing a Q&A site/section;

What insights can the analysis of the Moz Q&A site/section offer?

This first part goes beyond the simple analysis of a community and, using the Moz Q&A section, takes into account and discusses issues that are common to all Q&A sites.

The second part will published within a few weeks (I’m still “digesting” data and discovering great insights).

Auditing a Q&A site/section

Before people were sharing kittens and selfies on Facebook and Instagram, “social” was a synonym of “forums” in Internet-speak.

In forums, people were (and still are) sharing knowledge, funny things, and questions. Forums were the first collaborative space in the web, maybe the purest symbol of the web philosophy.

The forum’s collaborative nature and crowdsourced knowledge is so strong that – upon reflection – the success of social networks, which mimic forums (Reddit is a clear example), must be essentially attributed to it.

The advantages and difficulties of a Q&A site/section

Q&A sites are a specific variant of the forum idea, and their model is quite simple: People ask and answer questions about certain topics.

From an SEO point of view a well executed and maintained Q&A site/section has great positive effects:

It may help your site rank for long tails;

It may help your site earn natural links;

It may help your site earn social visibility (hence second-tier links);

It may help you discover ideas for new content;

It’s a great source for content to repurpose into other channels;

The data you collect thanks to the Q&A may help you with other business decisions; or

It may help you understand if a business decision was correct or not.

Its positive effects, then, have clear reflections on branding and thought leadership.

The simplest ideas, though, are usually the most complex to shape into something real.

The first difficulty is building a community that is able to feed the Q&A in the first place.

Even if I know people who could create hundreds of fake accounts all asking and answering questions in order to “show” a lively forum and thus attract new members, if you are creating a Q&A section as a feature in your site, then it may be better to create it when you already have even a small (but loyal) community.

Here is not the place to discuss how to build a community around your brand (check The Truly Monumental Guide to Building Online Communities by Mack Web Solutions for more on that), but if you are creating a Q&A section you must think at it as a product. Hence, first you must conduct an audience analysis, define the personas that you want to target with the Q&A, and from there, build the architecture of the section and shape its voice.

Moz doesn’t have this problem, as it has one of biggest and more loyal communities in its niche. Nevertheless, even if I am sure that Moz has portrayed what kind of personas are using its Q&A well, I tend to believe that this section of the Moz site has been designed more for marketers with at least a minimum of experience in the use of forums than it was for marketing newbies.

A very brief history of the Moz Q&A

The Q&A section was created in 2007 as a a Freemium feature. Only Pro subscribers could ask a limited number of questions per month to SEOmoz, but everybody (if the question wasn’t labeled as “private”) could read the Q&A.

In 2012, Moz revamped the Q&A section, eliminating the “private” questions and opening it to everybody, also introducing gamification rules (the “500 thumbs up rule”) which:

From one side can help fighting forum spam;

Push people to be proactive on the site and in the Q&A in order to fully participate in the community.

What didn’t really change was the architecture of the Q&A itself, which is partly still operating.

From the image above, apart from the funny Roger image, we can see how the categories were very broad back in 2012. That gave way to the more detailed architecture we see today.

First commandment: Strive for a perfect Q&A IA and navigation

Choosing a very broad architecture, especially in Q&As and Forums, can be a great idea in order:

To avoid thin categories;

To avoid “too many choices angst” (a syndrome caused also by eCommerce mega-menus).

The two issues listed above can be enhanced, then, by offering Q&A users the ability to enter their questions in up to a maximum of five categories, also in different topical areas.

This freedom, however, is:

Making it difficult to attribute a question to only one topic when it comes to data analysis;

Maybe contributing to the confusion the question askers may already have.

Hey Gianluca, weren’t you saying Moz Q&A was broad? Here I see a complex taxonomy!

Yes! The Moz Q&A has evolved through the years for the better, and the taxonomy used right now is very clear (check it out by trying to ask a question), but it still has issues, especially from a navigation point of view.

For instance, when we enter the Q&A home page we see by default the latest-submitted questions, but if we want to restrict our search, we may have a panic attack, because we can choose between 45 categories, and many appear to be very similar.

Too much freedom is not freedom, therefore: When offering users navigation through a taxonomy, it is always better to funnel them from broad to a more detailed offering, using both contextual menus and a way to go back in the architecture navigation.

Unfortunately, the Moz Q&A lacks both:

Because the main categories of the Q&A, i.e. “Moz Resources” or “Online Marketing,” are virtual and not made explicit with a real category page, the possibility of creating contextual menus is substantially hindered;

Because the Q&A section doesn’t include a breadcrumb navigation (the lack of which is probably not helping Googlebot in easily understanding the section’s information architecture).

Avoid confusion between categories and tags

In the recent past there was a sort of “anti-tags” crusade, especially in the blogging world.

This can be attributed to the misuse of tagging, which is usually considered to be a synonym of categorizing things, when the two in reality have a very different nature:

A category is that ontology value that include everything related to a specific topic. For instance, under the category “Link Building” we can find questions about broken link building, guest blogging, news syndication, image link attribution et al;

A tag is that transversal taxonomy value that reunites under its label questions from different categories, which share a same topic. For instance a tag “infographics” could be attached to questions that have been listed in different categories like Web Design, Technical SEO, Link Building and Content/Blogging.

If used well, then, tags can really improve the usability of a Q&A site:

Helping the asker specifying even better the nature of its question;

Help the Q&A community members (and the casual visitors, who are not into the Q&A niche jargon) in following only those specific topics about which they are interested.

From an SEO point of view, then, a well thought-out tagging system (which includes both a suggested tag engine and, ideally, a semantic tagging consolidation engine, and takes into account the duplicated content issue) can help the Q&A site become visible to an even greater set of queries, thanks especially to the semantic topical nature of the Tags’ pages.

Use category pages as topical hubs

When it comes to category pages, Q&As (and Forums in general) may present us some of the same uncertainties that categories in classified ads or eCommerce sites present, the main one being related to the weight we want to give to category pages in relation to the pages of the questions themselves.

In the case of Moz (just speculating here, now) the doubt was certainly greater, because the Moz Blog’s categories tend to overlap those of the Q&A section. This is immediately understandable if we look at the “link building” topic, which is both a Q&A and a Blog category (also because the Q&A categorization was modeled after that of the Blog, which came first).

In this case, Moz has decided that the blog is its main content asset (and has been since the beginning), and therefore the blog categories should have priority. They acted in order to have them ranking over the Q&A’s. And it did well.

But we could choose to follow the opposite path, using Q&A as the main content asset and, therefore, using its categories and sub-categories pages as “topical hubs.”

The concept of the topical hub is becoming more important every day, because of the evolution of Google itself and its shift to semantics and “understanding things” as opposed to simply indexing pages.

A topical hub, to be clear, is a page where people interested in a topic can start their research and navigation about the topic and its subtopics. They find relevant content about the topic itself, and these pages are some of the most important landing pages from an organic search perspective.

A topical hub, in the case of a Q&A category and tag page, should therefore evolve from being a simple paginated list of questions. It should move from being a transition page to become a full “reference page”.

What are the elements of a topical hub?

A clear description of what the topic the hub is about. It seems a bit “old-school” SEO, but it really isn’t. In Q&A sites, then, it has the particular function of confirming for people that they have landed on the correct page, which is both good for them and for those of us administering the Q&A. For instance, the category labeled “Reporting” in the Moz Q&A is quite confusing, as many people refer to it thinking about their Moz Analytics reports (with essentially support-related questions), and not about reporting in the broader sense.

The list of questions, with the visualization options you may desire to offer depending on the priorities you have assigned to the Q&A itself;

Contextual menu, in order to create relations between sister categories;

Tags menu, in order to create relations with transversal topics (also helping facilitate the crawling of questions pertaining to separate categories);

Contextual related content. In the case of Moz, contextual content can be:

Moz should suggest the Link Building Moz Academy videos in its Link Building category page in Q&A.

Help your analysts, empower your moderators

As we have seen, every Moz subscriber can include a question in up to five categories. Even though this is great for the users, from an analysis point of view it can make collecting insights quite difficult.

For instance, when I was analyzing one year of Moz Q&As, it was very hard to understand which category to attributing the main value to, because the large majority of the questions had been associated with more than one category (many in all the five categories allowed).

For this reason, apart from creating a tag system, it would be a wise idea to empower the moderators so that they can eventually place a question in a better-suited category and/or eliminate a question from an inappropriate or inconsistent category.

(Re)discover the importance of internal search

Internal search is the secret feature that makes sites with a massive amount of content stand out and be loved by their users.

It’s obviously not the only one, but when we think of sites like Amazon, Zillow, Tripadvisor, or Yelp, we can easily understand how internal search plays a major role in how a user of those sites is satisfied.

For that same reason, a certain specialization within SEO (one which is becoming more and more important) is what can be defined as Vertical Search Engine Optimization, meaning optimizing for the internal search algorithms of sites like the ones I just mentioned.

A Q&A site’s internal search, then, is essential for:

Helping users find questions for which they seek the answers; and

Limiting the creation of substantially duplicated content, with all the administrative loss of time it may cause.

We should not forget, finally, how the analysis of internal searches can help us re-discover a big percentage of the keywords Google hides behind the (not provided) wall.

But if you have a big Q&A site, then Google CSE may be not enough. In that case, even if there exist third-party commercial solutions, creating a native internal search algorithm is the best choice.

This is the path Moz followed, but is its algorithm a good one? It is not bad, but it could be improved.

In fact, when we perform an internal search (try “how to use hreflang?”), the internal SERP offered is not really the best one:

The first-ranking question is dated 2012; the second and fourth have responses, but are still tagged as not answered. The best question is ranking third.

Sure, Moz’s internal search allows us to refine our searches using advanced filters (for instance, searching for questions similar to ours in a determined category), but still, that should be an option, not a necessity.

So, what should the ranking factors be in a vertical Q&A search algorithm like the one Moz uses? Here are some suggestions:

The presence of keywords in the question title;

The presence of keywords in the question body;

The presence of keywords in the answers. For instance, “hreflang” may not be present in the question itself, but may be present in one or more responses, which means the question can be relevant for the user’s query;

The presence of one or more “Good Answers.” Good Answers are those that, in the Moz Q&A system, earn 3 or more thumbs up or are defined as such by a Q&A moderator. Clearly, a question with one or more good answers deserves better visibility in an internal SERP;

The presence of one or more “Staff Endorsements.” When an answer is particularly good, moderators may endorse it, giving it a bigger value than simple answers or even “Good Answers.” This should be the equivalent of links in the case of Moz Q&A :-);

Tbe freshness of the question. The reason is obvious: Questions, especially in inbound marketing, tend to become obsolete after a short time (but, remember, there are important exceptions). Therefore, showing the questions that match all the previous factors and that are also fresh as ranking first should be the rule.

Don’t forget the “suggested question” feature

Somehow related to the internal search algorithm issue, we can also find the “suggested question” issue.

This is something Quora was quite able to solve:

When someone is writing a question, Quora interprets the question they are writing (not always very well, to be honest) and presents the asker a list of already-answered questions that might solve the one they are about to ask. If the questions presented are not satisfying the user, they can still proceed to post their own question.

This feature is very helpful, again, for preventing the Q&A from being flooded with very similar questions, which is both useless for the users and the Q&A site itself (not to mention that it could be a potentially substantial duplicate content generator).

Pay attention to design changes

When I started analyzing the more than 20,000 questions users posted in Moz’s Q&A between May 2013 and April 2014, the first thing I noticed was an large decline in the number of questions posted after May 2013.

We must remember that one year ago this site rebranded from SEOmoz to Moz.

At first, then, I thought that the fall in the Q&A postings was due to some SEO factors. But, after sharing this insight and discussing it with the Moz marketing team, I focused on the re-design of the site as the potential reason for that drop.

In fact, if we look how the SEOmoz.org menu was, we will see that the Internal Q&A link was easily reachable by the users from the main menu:

In the Moz.com site, the link to the Moz Q&A can be discovered and clicked only if we first click on “Community,” opening the community hub page, and then click on Q&A.

Just moving the internal link away from the main menu may have caused the drop in posts.

What’s in the second part of this post?

This is the end of the fist part of this “Auditing the Moz Q&A” mini-series.

In the second part we will have a lot of fun, because analyzing 20,000+ questions can really offer us a realistic portrait of our industry’s fears, hopes, and trends.

I want to leave you with a teaser:

The Moz community has an obsession, and it’s not cats, sex, or whatever: It’s Google.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!